Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
(Teni Zabytykh Predkov)
Screening on Film
Directed by By Sergei Paradjanov .
With Ivan Nikolaichuk, Larisa Kadochnikova.
USSR, 1964, 35mm, color, 97 min.
Ukranian with English subtitles.
With Ivan Nikolaichuk, Larisa Kadochnikova.
USSR, 1964, 35mm, color, 97 min.
Ukranian with English subtitles.
When Shadows first appeared in the West, critics proclaimed its director the heir to Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. Now certified as a classic of world cinema, the film won more than a dozen prizes at international festivals, but was condemned by Soviet authorities as a work of "formalism" and "Ukranian nationalism." Paradjanov transformed an ancient Carpathian folk legend about two lovers whose families are embroiled in a blood-feud into a dizzying, rhapsodic pageant of sex, death, madness, myth, and ritual. Filming amongst the Gutsul tribe in the Carpathian mountains, Paradjanov and cinematographer Yuri Ilyenko conceived Shadows as a "dramaturgy of color," to summon up a world of pagan myth, blood, lust, and spiritual devastation.
